The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (32 page)

Clarke studied at St. John’s until late 1904, leaving just before Christmas to board in Milwaukee, where the school had found him a job making furniture and sculpting church altars.
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There was no shortage of work for the young man or others of his trade in those heady days, as the city’s population swelled during the early twentieth century, augmented especially by fresh waves of European immigrants who crowded into the ethnic neighborhoods on the South Side. However, unlike these foreign-born men and women who came to Milwaukee seeking new and better lives, Clarke after a few years (when exactly is unknown) opted to return to the old country of northern Montana, where he remained for the rest of his days.

Cutapuis

By the early twentieth century, the artist Charles Marion Russell was easily the most beloved figure in Montana, known throughout the United States and even overseas for his vivid paintings of the American West. Born in 1864 to a prominent St. Louis family, Charlie in his youth devoured the adolescent pulp fiction that became popular after the Civil War and that bred in him an insatiable curiosity about the frontier. Thinking that a stretch of manual labor on a western ranch might disabuse their son of his dreamy notions, his exasperated parents underwrote the boy’s trip to Montana in the summer of 1880. The plan backfired. Charlie never returned to his hometown, except for occasional visits.
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After spending several years in the saddle as a ranch hand, Russell had by the late 1880s turned his attention from working the range to capturing it with his paintbrush, an urgent task given that the Old West, as most thought of it, was quickly disappearing in the face of relentless modernization. His deeply romantic portraits of frontier subjects thus had broad appeal, earning him fame and wealth. Coupled with his legendary skills as a raconteur, Russell’s good nature won him the enduring affection of white Montanans, who considered “the Cowboy Artist” one of their own. Even today, the iconic buffalo skull icon he used as an imprimatur appears on many of the state’s automobile license plates.
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Considering Russell’s popularity and especially his reputation as an artist, John Clarke was surely ecstatic when he received a letter from Russell in May 1918 in response to a missive Clarke sent earlier that spring. The note is classic Russell: replete with misspellings and unorthodox punctuation, but nonetheless filled with charm and generosity. Apparently, Clarke had written seeking advice about the art market, and Russell offered his help, explaining, “[T]here is onley one Art store here [in Great Falls, where he lived] and I know they would be glad to handle your worke but whether they could sell it I couldint say … if you send aney here I will boost fore you.”
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That the two had never met and were at far different stages in their careers raises the question why Russell took an interest in Clarke. There are several reasons, not least among them Russell’s characteristic liberality. For another, Clarke’s personal circumstances probably aroused the older man’s curiosity and compassion. Unlike most of his contemporary white Montanans, Russell evinced a sincere concern for the state’s native peoples and lamented the federal government’s duplicity in its dealings with them. Moreover, just two years prior to his correspondence with Clarke, he had taken on a protégé, Joe De Young, a fellow Missourian who, after contracting spinal meningitis on the Arizona set of a Tom Mix western, had lost his hearing.
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Most of all, Russell championed Clarke because he admired the younger man’s work. As Clarke’s wife, Mamie, recalled, after that first exchange of letters, Russell dropped in at her husband’s studio every summer except his last, in 1926, when Russell’s failing health prevented even a short trip to East Glacier Park. “His visits were of greatest possible moments to John,” Mamie explained, adding, “Mr. Russell would … look at all of my husband’s work, sculpture and landscape (oil) and praise it, encouraging just enough and not too much. He was so understanding, deeply sympathetic and in all wholly lovable.”
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The men traded stories and ideas in PISL, which Russell had picked up from some of his native friends.

Charlie Russell was not the only prominent individual who admired John Clarke’s early artwork. Louis Hill, who had first noticed Clarke’s skill with a brush, came to appreciate his carving, too, so much that he commissioned Clarke to provide a number of sculpted wooden bears to serve as bases for the table lamps that illuminated the Glacier Park Lodge. For good measure, Clarke also supplied Hill with a hundred small carvings of Rocky Mountain goats, which sold for a dollar or two in the lodge’s gift shop.
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Clarke, however, received no compensation for the most important, and lasting, job he did for Hill. In 1921 the Great Northern Railway adopted the Rocky Mountain goat as the company logo, and emblazoned an image of the shaggy animal—based on a Clarke carving—on its trains and promotional materials. Despite claims to the contrary, Clarke was never credited with the design or paid a royalty for its use, perhaps because of a lingering debate over its provenance. And yet the cover of the railroad’s own magazine from May 1927 appears to resolve the matter, for it features a young woman posing with a two-foot sculpture of a Rocky Mountain goat executed by John Clarke.
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Word of Clarke’s abilities seeped beyond the borders of the Treasure State during World War I, aided in no small measure by Mary C. Wheeler, chair of the art department of the Helena Woman’s Club. In 1916 Wheeler had invited Clarke to debut his work as part of a larger exhibition, and she was so impressed by an animal grouping featuring a bison bull and cow that she sent the piece to W. Frank Purdy, director of the School of American Sculpture in New York City. Purdy shared Wheeler’s enthusiasm and thus arranged for showings of Clarke’s work throughout the eastern United States. Their good judgment was vindicated in 1918 when Clarke won his first major award, a gold medal presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art for his carving of a bear.
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Bolstered by these successes, Clarke expanded his operations. Since his return from Wisconsin, he had lived with his father and Aunt Helen until 1913, when he established a studio on the main thoroughfare in East Glacier Park. The small clapboard house was situated on the east side of the railroad tracks, just a few yards from the Great Northern depot, assuring a steady stream of visitors during the busy summer months. Following his triumph in Pennsylvania and an attendant spike in sales, Clarke opened a second studio—really more of a rustic retreat, with its cramped interior and unfinished stone walls—in Many Glacier, fifty miles northwest in the Swiftcurrent valley. Although Louis Hill built a resort there in 1915, this one a Swiss chalet, Many Glacier’s distance from the train station as well as its location inside the eastern boundary of the park offered Clarke unfettered access to wildlife, whether hunting game or merely observing animal mannerisms and behavior, all the better for rendering them in wood.

As he entered his late thirties, John Clarke was not only an accomplished artist but also a deaf man with considerable personal independence who moved comfortably within the nondeaf community as well, thanks in part to his fluency in PISL. Though little is known about his relationship with his siblings, surely he took note of the achievements of his older brother Malcolm, who made the most of the educational opportunities offered him at the Carlisle Indian School, even becoming something of a poster child for the place, reporting on his accomplishments as a rancher and as a leader among the mixed-blood people on the Blackfeet Reservation.
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Against great odds, John had equaled his sibling. In coming years he would take his place as perhaps the most celebrated member of this remarkable family.

D
ESPITE THE GOOD FORTUNE
that visited John Clarke in 1918—a budding relationship with Charlie Russell, professional accolades, and a new studio—the most important development in his life that year had nothing to do with woodcarving. On 6 May, John wed Mary Peters Simon—known by her friends as Mamie—at Whitefish, a lake-side town on the Great Northern Railway located two dozen miles west of Glacier National Park. Although their wedding day dawned cold, with a touch of frost on the ground, the late spring sun “turned the morning into a bright, mud-puddle day.”
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Mamie was not a native Montanan, having come west sometime in the early twentieth century with her family, which had roots in the sprawling farm country along the Illinois–Indiana border south of Chicago. She had met John in the summer of 1916, when he was working for his brother-in-law guiding tours through the park and Mamie was cooking for the Bar X Six, a saddle horse ranch headquartered just outside Babb, in the far northwestern corner of the Blackfeet Reservation.
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That John fell hard for Mamie is easy to imagine, given her broad, handsome face and crystalline eyes. For her part, neither John’s race nor his deafness seemed to give her pause, perhaps because as a divorcée, Mamie was no stranger to social bias. Whether she knew sign language beforehand or became fluent after the marriage, she was an expert signer, no small feat for a hearing person. As one friend recalled, “she could sign so fast, you couldn’t keep up with her.”
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John and Mamie Clarke, ca. 1920s. The couple married in 1918; Mamie, an expert signer, assumed the business responsibilities for John’s artistic career. Courtesy of Joyce Clarke Turvey.

By all accounts theirs was a happy marriage, reflecting perhaps the gratitude of two people in their late thirties who had despaired of ever finding life partners (the median age of first marriage at the time was twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women). And yet the union between artist and spouse can be a fraught one, as the marriage of Charlie and Nancy Russell illustrated. In that relationship, the painter’s friends resented the supposed meddling of his much younger wife, who kept him out of the saloon and at his easel, determined to push him to still greater creative heights (and earnings).

Mamie played a similar if less controversial role in John’s career, serving as his “interpreter, his press secretary, his correspondent, [and] his business manager,” though unlike Nancy Russell she never earned a reputation as a harridan. This was in part because of her winning personality, but also because John, though unfailingly described as gentle and patient, resisted any steering. Mamie once explained, with perhaps a hint of loving exasperation, “John does what he pleases, when he pleases. Right now he has abandoned sculpturing for a while to build a boat for fishing on Two Medicine Lake. He has become nearly exhausted building that boat. That is the way he works with everything.”
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Many outsiders, however, attributed John’s accomplishments almost entirely to Mamie, as if a deaf Indian man were incapable of caring for himself or orchestrating his own successful career. Take, for example, a newsletter story from 1927. Describing the fits and starts of John’s early years, the writer explained, “Perhaps he might have given up the struggle had not destiny decreed that a white girl should love him, should become his wife and appreciate his ability.”
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While such sentiments were laced with the casual racism of the day (thus the emphasis on Mamie’s whiteness), they reflected also the belief that, because of John’s deafness, only sustained and compassionate intervention by others could bring his talent to light.

Mamie, of course, was not John’s only helper. In the same 1918 letter in which he volunteered to “boost” for Clarke in Great Falls and beyond, Charlie Russell wrote, “[I]f you have an Indian name I think it would be good to use it.” Russell’s advice was solid, for he knew how valuable his own background as a cowboy had proved in establishing his authenticity with locals and art buyers alike. Up to that point, Clarke had usually signed his pieces “J. L. Clarke,” but apparently he warmed to Russell’s suggestion and began emblazoning his pieces (usually but not exclusively) with Cutapuis, which in Piegan means “Doesn’t Talk,” a moniker bestowed upon him as a youth because of his deafness. However authentic, this was also just the sort of touch that would appeal to buyers in the East and elsewhere and help make his sculptures more appealing and valuable.

In time, however, Clarke would go even further in embracing and promoting his native heritage. Like Russell, he often illustrated his correspondence with rough sketches or even full-fledged drawings, and just as Russell had done with the buffalo skull, he began adding an Indian head to his signature. More dramatic still were the changes Clarke made to the façade of his second home-studio, which he opened in the early 1920s on Highway 49, on the opposite side of the railroad tracks and a few hundred yards to the northwest of his previous building, which had burned down sometime after the end of World War I.